How 'Football Manager' Changed My Life

My name is Chris Darwen, and the Football Manager video game series changed my life.

I was born in a small town called Farnham in Surrey, England, and I lived there until I was 16. Outside of the standard “just one more game” ethos when I was a teenager on the old Championship Manager that decided when I went to bed, my first major life decision dictated by the FM series was the choice to move to Spain.

I am now director at Club Deportivo Torrevieja. My girlfriend and I had already confirmed Spain was going to be the destination when we decided to move. Different parts of the country pretty much guarantee sunshine, decent food and a cheap cost of living, so it wasn’t a hard sell.

But the decision to move to Torrevieja was totally down to my ability to manage the team through the Spanish league system and to La Liga on FM.

The reason Torrevieja was even in the hat was down to the research of my girlfriend. She narrowed our next location down to two places. I didn’t even get as far as managing the other side, as I led Torrevieja to back-to-back promotions in my first two seasons, so I was confident I could get them into La Liga in record time.

We could have ended up somewhere else, but would I have been able to get a role in their club? Had the other location been somewhere like Morocco, I think it still would have gone head-to-head with Torrevieja.

By the time we moved, I had already written a pretty successful book based on the management games called Johnny Cooper, Championship Manager, so the influence of Football Manager was pretty much starting to take over everyday life anyway.

Having been to watch our first Torrevieja match, we bought a programme. I noticed the vice president, a cracking guy called Jeff Scott, was clearly British, and his email was in the programme. So I contacted him, basically offering my services free of charge to do anything from coaching to selling raffle tickets.

We eventually met, and I ended up being elected onto the board by the president with the remit of getting more bums on seats at matches. I am proud to say the football club has had loads of exposure since, though we have not seen a dramatic rise in people attending the games yet. Little by little.

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Growing up, Championship Manager improved my social life. I finally had something in common with the cool kids at school; we used to spend night and day playing our saves. The same happened at college and university, albeit with different people.

I don’t think it is any coincidence my career was in building sales teams. In fact, during the biggest interview I ever had for a sales-management job, the interviewer (who became my boss) asked me about how I would manage a football team in real life. He got the similarity between building a sales team and building a football team.

Without doubt, my experience in building clubs and teams on FM helped me in the real world when building sales teams and organisations. You have to think logically. You have to be able to plan short term and long term. You have to cope with your best sales person losing form or leaving. You have to have a youth policy in place so you can promote from within. There are many similarities.

I think as FM develops as a game, the gap between setting a team up on the pitch in real life and on the computer gets closer and closer. It will not be long before FM can credibly be used in coaching courses as a real-life simulation. FM will have inspired a lot more ideas when I step back into coaching teams.

We are probably a decade away from opening our minds to doing things like this at CD Torrevieja. On the technical side, it is still run in a very traditional way, which is interesting.

For example, I believe that by simulating a Torrevieja save for five seasons in advance, you might be able to find at least one player who has incredible potential we could try to sign now. Is that crazy? I don’t think so.

The researchers are so accurate on FM that if there is a potential talent in the lower Spanish leagues, they will probably be on the game and still widely unknown, even in Spain. I am not saying you would recruit purely based off it, but it would give you some interesting ideas on whom to scout.

In terms of using it as a coaching tool, I believe any coach could use it and learn how to set up a decent 4-2-3-1, for example. You’d know what individual things you would be asking of each player and what general instructions to give the team.

Even so, Football Manager isn’t that widely played out here from what I gather. A few of the lads in the team have played it before, but not that many. I am probably known more for my work with the football club itself than FM, and to be fair, that’s the way it should be in the local community. The biggest thing I am working on at the moment is helping Torrevieja become a well-known and well-supported club.

Frustratingly, if every person who has watched the FM video online, watched the advert on TV and seen the YouTube advertising had donated just €0.50, the club would have raised over €500,000 this year. It would have made us financially stable for the next few seasons and meant our president would get a year off from dipping into his own pockets to stop the club going bust.

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My old man used to say to me I would never get anywhere in life if I kept spending so many hours playing football-management simulation games. Well, two successful books on the subject later and using it to end up on the board at a football club is a fair return for those hours I think! The opportunities that have arisen have been incredible.

Cherno Samba has been chasing me asking to write an "autobiography" based on his career in the game. People are always getting in touch wanting to help the club, and loads more people have signed up to be members since hearing my story.

Courtesy of Chris Darwen.

I'm hoping it might lead to a club out here offering me a role on the coaching side of things—otherwise I might have to do a real-life FM16 Create-A-Club! I am pretty sure that if, for example, tomorrow I got the chance to coach an actual side purely off the back of the FM story, then I would have to prove myself to people very quickly. But I am confident I could do that.

If you had told me 18 months ago, with where my life was at that point, that I would be a published author, have been on the TV advertising FM, be living in Spain and be the director of a football club, I wouldn’t have believed you. But it has happened, which shows anything can happen if you let it.

Thanks to Chris for giving up his time to contribute. You can follow him on Twitter right here. Be sure to check out the CD Torrevieja website. FM16 is available on PC, Mac and Linux from Friday.